Cultural Mediations of Brands

ForewordThe Economy in its Culture

Walter Benjamin wrote, in the preparatory notes of his Arcades Project: “Marx exposes the causal relationship between economics and culture. What matters here is the expressive correlation. It is no longer necessary to present the economic genesis of culture, but the expression of the economy in its culture” (Benjamin 1989, p. 476). The project to which this book makes a rich and structured contribution cannot be better defined.

To conduct a critical and comprehensive analysis of the relationships between the economy and culture, it is necessary to begin by resisting the temptation to see them as two domains that are foreign to each other. To study the economy in its culture is to understand why the actors of capitalism, brands and market industries cannot deploy their strategy, which is foreign or even indifferent in itself, to the democratic, patrimonial and above all culturally emancipatory project, without claiming to be actors of culture themselves, in the social sense of the term. And, above all, without interfering in the sharing between the multiple meanings of this complex and controversial notion, its practices, its values and its knowledge.

Even if Benjamin distanced himself from Marx, it must be remembered that he had insisted on the fact that there is no exchange value without use value, which can be understood in not only practical but also symbolic terms. Nor is it communicative: there is no production of exchange value, in ...